New, modern yurt build in Mongolia

[UKadventurer]

Thanks. We're all good. I hope you and yours are doing well too.

We've been busy. We went commercial with our home as a tourist camp. We started a bit late in the season (1st week of August) but have had a steady, but small, number of bookings. We're only offering 2 gers at this point. One for a couple and the other for up to 4 guests. We hope to keep getting guests maybe even into winter. So far we have bookings into early October.

I made improvements to the modern gers but we also fixed up 2 more traditional, Mongolian gers for guests.

A couple of improvements to our modern gers were adding exterior metal corner trim pieces to the bathroom/hallway. Before, the ends of the steel sandwich panels were exposed, showing the EPS, and looked a bit ghetto. Sort of like this, but I added door trim (brown sheet metal too) more since this photo. Looks much nicer than before.



We put an enclosure around the bathtub so it'd be suitable for taking stand up showers. Plus a shower curtain.



Also, I finally put up shelves and desks. More of those to come.




The biggest project was an entirely new heating system. The electric heating supplemented by wood stoves was too expensive to run last winter and not even that warm on the coldest nights. So I had a semi-coke briquette boiler installed in a partitioned room in one of the shipping containers. It's got 5 radiators, either large or small, depending on the room size, running anti-freeze. It should cost 5-10% of the cost of electricity to run and it cost $3k installed. Hopefully, it'll pay for itself by the 2nd winter and be more cozy too. In exchange for a little work, I should be able to save >90% of what last heating season cost.




The 2 Mongolian gers are looking really nice inside. For winter guests, we'd need to add an extra layer of felt and convert the wood stoves for semi-coke briquette use and airflow control on the flue. It's essential to have a full night's burn which is almost impossible with wood. Coke can do that and costs far less. They look like this inside (outside they look pretty standard:




We offer activities, such as hiking, horse riding, e-bikes (electric dirt bikes and mountain bikes), archery, ping pong, etc. I'm really enjoying having guests on a small scale and it gives us a little income stream.



I traded a cheap Chinese herder motorcycle, which I didn't like anyway, for 2 horses and we got a couple of cashmere goats (mother and kid) free from one of my wife's herder relatives. It's made life interesting. Baby goats in particular are hilarious.



We think there's a good future in adventure tourism, so it's something we'd like to pursue. I think we'll be much better prepared for the high season next year.

I actually know the YouTube couple "Simple Wild Living". We've chatted and shared tips and tricks but have yet to meet in person. He's doing some interesting projects but we're taking a different approach. It'd be nice to grow our own veggies though! His interpretation of "wild" is not the same as mine.